I AM NOT: Asleep Anymore
by Navel of the Turtle Man
Summary: You don't always have to dream to have nightmares. Post Reaper's death. Spoilers for 5th season. First shot at CM fic. Be gentle!


**AN: I know this thing needs work, I know it sucks, I fell off the Beta radar and now I'm paying for it. What can I say? Criticism is welcome, not flames. Like at your own risk. **

**Post-Episode "100."**

I AM NOT...

Hotch had nightmares. They were streaks of violence, fear, blood, and screaming; his own personal hell caught on reels of distorted memories, running behind his eyes night after night for weeks at a time. And though those elements changed in shape and form and volume just as he changed, they never really went away.

Not until Foyet. Not until now.

When Hotch was young, he had nightmares of his father.

He dreamed of his mother's screams, too loud and too useless. He dreamed of his life blood, staining thick knuckles not his own and tangy on his tongue. He dreamed of the swing of a fist, the buckle of a belt, the impact of _force_ on his back-side-leg-face-anywhere-he-could-reach. He dreamed of trying to run like the little boy he was, of trying to stand up and be a man, and he dreamed that his legs collapsed under him no matter what he did and in the end, he always came back the floor with his own blood.

(I am not my father, I am just a boy.)

When Hotch got older—became a man and a lawyer and an agent but not yet a leader—he had nightmares of his friends.

He dreamed that his partner, whoever-he-was-stuck-with-this-time, turned on him, became a specter and the angel of murderers and victims. Sometimes, he dreamed that _he_ became the specter, chased down his partner, and gutted the man-woman-whoever-he-couldn't-remember-now-anyways. They would wail at him to stop, please, didn't he have any mercy? And then the roles would switch the next night, and he would be begging.

Some nights Hotch dreamed that his friends—the other superheroes of the justice system and wannabe good lawyers who put away bad men—became his family. And that was even worse, because they became victims to one another, taking turns being bloodied and crying and begging, then bloodying _him_ and pulling tears from _him_ and making _him_ beg again.

And then some nights, he was the villain, and they were the victims, and the murderers and the thieves were the agents. On those nights, Hotch woke up sweating and confused and more murderous than he ever had the right to feel, he thought. He always went back to sleep and woke up ashamed.

(I am not a criminal, I am just myself.)

When Hotch entered the BAU, he—predictably—had nightmares of the killers, and the ones he didn't save.

He dreamed of the girls skinned and eaten and ruined by the cannibals, of being fed pieces of them by their family, of being eaten by the girls' rotting corpses (what had been found, that is).

He dreamed of the rape victims—boys-girls-men-women-strung out on a calendar in pin-up poses and he was the son-of-a-bitch who got off on them. And every time he woke from those dreams drenched in a cold, shaking sweat, he felt a flash of fear and horror that he had _really_ spent himself on those dream-dead-dolls.

Hotch swore on his mother's soul that, if he ever found more than a stain of perspiration on the sheets after one of those nightmares, he would remove his manhood with a hot knife (just so he wouldn't be tempted, of course).

Once and a while, he would have seven nights of the exact same horror: Dragging himself through oceans of photographs of those people that _had_ to die to give them that next clue, _had_ to get raped, tortured, ruined, just so he could avenge them and put the weeks' boogieman away. The photographs would scream at him, reaching from their frames to give him paper-cuts that bled Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper's blood. Then the dream would shift, and he would be running from the victims, afraid to die because they chanted at him, "We need another body! We need more clues!"

(I am not the monster, I am just a man.)

When Hotch began to lead his own team, he had nightmares of becoming Gideon, and then Rossi.

He dreamed of being dogged by the faces of killers never caught, and of giving up on what was left of his life—a family, a child, a quiet, happy retirement.

He dreamed of not trusting, and even fearing people as open and loving as Reid and Garcia, of becoming as jaded and unattached as the experts who walked side-by-side with him, and yet lingered on the outside. He dreamed of hating parts of himself, and of dead-bolting closets overflowing with skeletons.

He dreamed of being alone, and of being so much like the monsters he hunted, that he had forgotten how much it hurt.

(I am not alone, I am just cold.)

When Gideon left, he had nightmares (in that brief interlude before Rossi began haunting him) of losing the rest of his team.

He dreamed of Reid—a little boy to the bone, no matter how old his driver's license or his IQ made him out to be—falling under the hands of another Hankle, only this time Hankle had Hotch's father's face, and there was no one saving him from the blows at the end of the nightmare.

He dreamed of Garcia—all sweet and sass and as dangerous as a kitten to him, no matter how good she was with computers—caught and cut up and strewn about with symbols and codes cut into her skin, her sparkling hair-bobs tangled in bloody curls.

He dreamed of JJ trapped and starved in the basement of some sicko's house, just waiting to say the wrong thing, take one misstep out of the fantasy that kept her alive, cringing at every scream and every blow that followed a miscalculation.

He dreamed of Morgan, no longer strong and invincible, but small and young again, and saw him going through his time with Carl Buford all over again, only Morgan didn't grow too old for Buford, and Buford didn't let him go home to his mother at the end of the day.

He dreamed that Elle was the one caught by the King Fisher, and when the castle burned down, she screamed and went with it.

When they buried Haley, he stopped having nightmares. He stopped having dreams. Hotch stopped waking up screaming, or sweating, or even jumping out of bed. He stopped seeing his own fears and history twisted into fiction.

Foyet's last strike had lent him enough hell for a lifetime of nightmares, and it seemed like his imagination couldn't come up with anything worse. So Hotch doesn't dream anymore. He takes what should be nightmares into the waking world.

He wakes up feeling the cold, messy weight of Haley's head in his hands, and that weight is still there when he holds Jack to him. He wakes up seeing the life bleed out of the Reaper's eyes, and the evil that remained in those eyes reflects in the mirror. He wakes up feeling his fingers trace the trigger of his gun, and he hears the shot that took his wife away every time he turns the safety off. He wakes up with a phone and a gunshot and Garcia's sobs in his ears, and now he thinks he will have to get a new phone. He wakes up with adrenalin and rage, and no matter what he tells Morgan, or Jack, or himself, there is nothing "Okay" about how he's doing. He wakes up with his little boy in a room with a killer, and sometimes he has to remind himself not to check that hiding spot, and that Jack is still alive. He wakes up in his car, in his house, in his bedroom, where he had once been happy, and takes the echos of Haley and Foyet with him.

Hotch doesn't have to have nightmares anymore. He has lived the worst nightmare of all—he has faced his elements, and he is not asleep anymore.

(I am not Foyet. I am…)


End file.
